notes from St. Petersburg

I'm curious as to whether a particularly coherent entry is going to come out of this... I'm not feeling as though the prose is flowing smoothly today, but maybe I'll at least put down some interesting ideas.

We're in St. Petersburg, FL, which is where my mother's family lives, and I'm currently using my grandfather's computer (which I built, as it turns out), and tomorrow, I'm headed over to Orlando to visit with Esther eponis. Yay for things and people in central Florida being fairly close to each other :)

I know I talk about this a lot, and I know that I'm sappy and unnervingly happy with my life (where's the existential angst?), but my family is so freaking cool. Particularly, I'm thinking about my grandfather right now -- he's ... just... radiant. He's into his middle seventies and occasionally bursts out spontaneously jogging. His eyes are blue and about as bright as his smile, and his hands are broad and strong, with nails that he clearly takes care of. He goes walking a lot. He picks up trivia like lint; he knows about a staggeringly wide variety of things and people. He can probably take you at Jeopardy. He knows every road, everywhere, and knows how to get from A to B, for A and B in the set of places (and he knows how you would've done it before the Interstate system was in place). He's quite funny, and his jokes are subtle. He's quite good with his 1930s-era accordion (which he's had since he was like 10), remembers songs from many decades ago, and plays them by ear. He's involved with the church and volunteers for the Salvation Army...

... hrm. Yes. You've probably gathered that I approve.

And... I've been going through Words and Rules by Steven Pinker, which is darn skippy. Even if Stacie dbbuddha likes to make fun of him... Stacie, when I'm finished with this, remind me to ask you about that again, and then maybe I can more intelligently discuss this...

... part of why I like this book is the actual content: it's making me think about the patterns of voiced/unvoiced consonants towards the end of words and how they interact with the suffixes that we tack on to the end. Trivially, listen to the sounds you're actually making when you say "dogs" as opposed to "cats". Your voicebox is busy at the end of "dogs" -- it's like "dogz", and it's on for both 'g' and 'z'. The contrary is true for "cats" ... both 't' and 's' are unvoiced sounds. Stuff like that, only much more sophisticated... and he's talking about the process of verbs becoming regular and irregular over time. And he sees Hacker speech as linguistically interesting and cites the well-known "plural of VAX is VAXen" bit...

The other thing I'm enjoying is his apparent internal struggle between his urges to study language in the wild and to "correct" usage... he discusses the "gotchas" built into the language that one doesn't learn until well into school, addresses the inconsistencies in why the educated elite insist on maintaining "data" and "datum" or "criteria"/"criterion" as plural/singular (and cringe when someone doesn't) while all sorts of other Latin- and Greek-based words don't get the same treatment -- "agenda", for example, should be the plural of agendum, but it's almost never used that way. "So, do you have an agenda?" The processes by which this sort of thing happen are discussed at length, and it's fascinating, if occasionally dense.

The self-appointed Guardians of The Purity of the Language (who've been popping up every so often for the past several centuries) are mostly just made to look silly, which fits in well with my personal preconceptions.

Erm... yes... and that's about that for the moment.

IN CONCLUSION! My family is cool, particularly my grandfather, and I've been reading about linguistics because I'm a geek. Thank you for your time.